A Way to Brew Morphine Raises Concerns Over Regulation | Hacker News Reader

A Way to Brew Morphine Raises Concerns Over Regulation

nytimes.com

29 pointsdbcooper43 comments

Dr Oye wants us to seriously entertain the idea that if we simply regulate drug production then we would be safe from drug cartels? Regulation is not a magic cure for basic human behavior. If people want drugs, they will get them, and there will be others to make it. Any time you make a law restricting the production of drugs, you are simply removing competition for those that don't follow the law. Drug cartels would be stopped in their tracks if the US ended the war on drugs.

I also find it curious that he comments on big pharma already having access to abundant supplies of opium, but it would be disaster if local producers could produce morphine or heroine. God forbid anyone else undercuts them with a cheaper-to-produce product.

Any talk of how to better fight the drug war is just rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. Drug use is a medical and social issue, not a criminal one. The attitude of drugs as a criminal issue is also one of the reasons the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. I am frankly tired of being fed the notion that the existence of drugs is a constant danger to society, and the only way out is to fight a never-ending war.

I couldn't have said it better myself. You are absolutely spot on. Thanks.

I'm just going to quote this from now on.

Then there is Portugal. Decriminalization of most drugs and instead of giving prison time they give treatment.

>The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead?

http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,0...

If you create a black market for something - it is often less regulated, more dangerous, and more criminal than what you are trying to ban.

paraphrasing an old adage:

There's no money in the cure.

Prison time for drug use alone is a waste of resources. Prison time for crimes committed while under the influence is probably necessary (not just politically, but the moral hazard offering "under the influence" as a way to reduce your punishment is a pretty bad incentive). A big problem is the difficulty in determining who is a "user" and who is a "distributor who uses." Not sure there is a good solution there, but a great start would be replacing incarceration for simple possession with treatment.

I was surprised to learn the prevalence of illegal substances in prisons [0]. If authorities are unable to curtail access to drugs in one of the most controlled environments in the country, what hope do they have of removing them from the streets? Seems like a lost cause.

[0] http://nakedlaw.avvo.com/crime/how-common-are-drugs-in-priso...

I believe you fundamentally misunderstand.

In order to believe that the authorities really think they can remove drugs, you'd have to assume they continue to hold this belief in spite of 44 years of post war-on-drugs evidence. I mean, I think cops are authoritarian idiots, but they're not that stupid. As Bill Hicks said, we had a war on drugs, and the people on drugs won. They're more pure and often cheaper than ever.

Rather, the war on drugs is a way to systematically deprive people of civil rights and transfer control to police. Not to mention all the private prison vendors who are making bank. And the military industrial complex selling weapons to the police. Seen from this angle, actions make sense.

After all, we've never really had a war on drugs -- we've had a war on some classes (black, poor) of people who use some (crack bad! coke ok! heroin bad! adderall good! xanax good!) drugs.

I don't think it's hopeless, it's just that focusing on removing the supply without solving the root cause (namely that there is major, lucrative demand) is a waste of resources.

The prison example is one of the most illustrative of the endemic problems of regulation: in prison, both the buyers and the substances are regulated by law, yet the presence of buyers inevitably leads to sellers filling the demand.

Humans see censorship, embargoes, and prohibitions as damage and route around them.

Also - regulation would not help. Drug cartels only need to know it is possible and they will find a way. Even in 3rd world countries there are universities. Scientists there are trained to produce miracles out of double nothing. And with the money cartels have - buying research won't be hard.

Scary stuff. Not because of the reasons cited in the article -- but because I hadn't previously realized that drug cartels have obvious incentives to invest in synthetic biology expertise.

That sort of capability can later be directed to applications such as massive destruction, or even extortion of nation states. Not to mention experimental organisms wrecking ecosystems. These dangers would (and have) made wonderful movie plots and I'd prefer them to stay on the big screen.

One obstacle in the past has been that the transition from "make lots drugs and robust transportation/communication networks" to "make weapons of mass destruction" has been so long as to be irrelevant. There was no plausible organizational evolutionary path from one to the other. But perhaps that has changed. This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of applications of synthetic biology to drug creation.

Imagine what the word would look like if you could make nuclear bombs using the same tech used to produce heroine.

Would drug cartels have a thriving side business selling them to ____? Would any nation state be able to control the cartels at all?

Killing your customers is bad business. Cartels operate sound businesses. So we have nothing to fear from them.

Now this tech in some crazy hands is dangerous.

But with the power amplification in modern times -

Two generations ago - a person could create a small business or small terrorist act alone.

10 years ago it was possible to have a thousand person billion dollar company and 9/11 ...

Now we have a billion dollar company with single digit numbers of employees and we will have the first billion dollar one man company in the next 5-10 years.

I leave the rest to your imagination. But you should not be worried from terrorist organisations - disgruntled lone wolves will be the real danger.

>Killing your customers is bad business. Cartels operate sound businesses. So we have nothing to fear from them.

I highly suggest you look up the Zetas cartel and their methodologies.

I'd argue that they are killing their competitors not customers

Sure but the original argument was that the drug cartels have a tremendous potential for violence. That seems established and the "customer" part's a red haring.

And how many american consumers have been killed by the Zetas?

I think it's a little more complicated than that. Would selling nuclear weapons to african despots kill the customers of of a mexican drug cartel?

That said - I agree that lone wolves may be a much worse problem, especially in the long run. For now, there is something to be said for having billions of dollars of drug money to spend on R&D...

Something that keeps me up at night is the idea of someone a bit more amoral than usual getting enough experience with gene driver technology, and using it to push genetic modifications quickly through the human species.

Don't like someone with $genetic_trait? Tune your virus to target a specific piece of DNA, and then have it remove genetic segments responsible for life critical functions (a la CRISPR CAS9).

https://www.neb.com/tools-and-resources/feature-articles/cri...

It's a worry that's been around for a while:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague

http://eidolon.net/?story=The%20Moral%20Virologist

(and probably plenty of others I'm forgetting)

The track record of the illegal drug industry in organic chemistry is not impressive. They can't make consistently good LSD or MDMA. Both of those are difficult to do right and require frequent analysis with expensive equipment to control the process. They can't even make methamphetamine without screwing up. There's a direct synthesis for cocaine. It's documented.[1] The drug cartels are still doing it the old fashioned way, growing coca. With most pharmaceuticals, the quality control costs more than the production.

So this is probably not a major problem.

[1] https://www.erowid.org/archive/rhodium/chemistry/cocaine.tot...

Heroin should be legal for anyone to purchase aged 21 or over. Sell it off of liquor store shelves in clean, measured doses, with single-use needles. All sealed up with tamper-proof packaging.

Let the big pharmaceutical companies manufacture it. They can do it so cheap they'll drive the cartels out of business.

It's amazing that anyone could think that this could be a problem.

Links to the paper [1] and commentary [2] in Nature Chemical Biology:

[1] http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nc...

[2] http://www.nature.com/news/drugs-regulate-home-brew-opiates-...

Calling the FBI is the alternative to the top-down approach? Thank you Supervisory Special Agent for letting me know that as long as we call before a crime is committed, that makes the FBI a community level grassroots organization.

Could you genetically modify yeast to produce LSD?

LSD was accidentally discovered while looking into variations of chemicals made by Ergot. Maybe it would be easier to modify yeast, maybe it would be easier to modify ergot.

This is the tip of a large iceberg. There is no reason all sorts of drugs can't be made in this way. Get a bit of that yeast and you can do it yourself.

It's completely legal to grow opium poppies, it's just not legal to extract the sap, or to process it.

It's also a simpler way to get started producing morphine than to be doing cutting edge genetically engineering of bacteria to produce it as a byproduct of sugar digestion.

Kuro5hin's trane claims that it has been legal to grow opium poppies in the US since the early seventies. You can use them for ornamentation, to eat the seeds and so on but not for use as a drug.

I haven't actually looked but expect there is wild opium growing in the high desert of california.

They are listed as a scheduled substance - including both the flower and straw meaning you can't actually grow them, but no one enforces it for ornamental purposes.

It's my understanding that the ornamental ones, being bred for the flowers, don't have much in terms of opiates.

</gardener>

Papaver somniferum is a large, pretty flower. As nice as most other poppies.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Papaver_somniferum_(2...

As the famous Michael Pollan article notes[0], P. somniferum is also sold as P. paeoniflorum, there's very little oversight. And of course if there was, the DEA would have to burn down lots of gardens. P. Bracteatum contains thebaine and can be used to produce codeine with a little ochem[1] and I see it growing in plenty of yards.

0: http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/opium-made-easy/

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papaver_bracteatum

A few years ago I was introduced to a fellow through an acquaintance of mine. We were attending a BBQ one evening and I noticed what looked to be poppies growing in a planter. So I asked him about it and he confirmed my suspicions. According to him, the area (Northern California valley) was great for growing them. I had no idea and had never seen any in person.

A very good childhood friend of mine has been growing small amounts papaver somniferum (opium poppies) in his back yard because it is much cheaper than prescription pain killers. He was injured in a car accident and has lived with debilitating pain most of his adult life.

I'm curious, has he avoided opium addiction or is it just that the effects of addiction are less bad than his pain?

We have always generally been pretty responsible drug users throughout our lives, and so he knows how to avoid addiction, or to minimize its affect on him. Opioids are easy to escalate in dose and frequency, and for some years I was prescribed oxycodone for my pain, but I did not abuse it, because I had his help in avoiding addiction. I think education is the best tool to avoid this.

I'd never thought about it before, but poppy-seed muffins are fairly popular in Western culture; what is the source of all of those seeds? Is it a similar situation as Coca-Cola has with the DEA?

There are different varieties of poppies. Some are unsuitable for narcotics production as they don't produce the opiates in question.

Still, consider the following information which I had assumed to be an urban legend but is apparently true:

http://www.snopes.com/medical/drugs/poppyseed.asp

Will those unsuitable for narcotics production still yield a positive test result?

Also it highly interests me to find an edge case that various law-enforcement agencies haven't handled at all.

I'm not sure and can't do any quick research as I'm at work. I'm generally interested in traditional pharmacology but have to admit that opiates don't interest me very much compared to other naturally occurring psychoactive substances.

Short Afghanistan.

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